The Nature of the Beasts - Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (PBK)

Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital―an institutional marker of national accomplishment―but also as a site for the propagation of a new "natural" order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained.